Keep Your Hands From Your Face

Feb 1 2020

In this age of contagion

we are urged to wash our hands.

But we are creatures of touch,

and know this

by the hollowed-out children

who were spurned and abandoned
and never once knew love.

So why did I feel so anxious

to be held, enfolded, hugged?

My body tensing, pushing away,

confined, instead of consoled

in their unselfconscious embrace?

It is the invisible

we fear most.

The imaginings

and conspiracies

about things not touched or seen,
our reflexive distrust of experts
our comforting beliefs. 

But how pleasurable, skin-on-skin.

When sex

introduced itself.

Its irrepressible urge, consuming heat.

Its messiness

and wetness

and all-out abandon.

The snake in the grass,

slithering like silk

through soft sensitive hands.

And now, on our own.

Hermetic creatures

who keep our hands to ourselves.

Who are carriers, vectors

instruments of death,

loaded weapons

with their safeties off.

I remember the nurse

who taught us proper technique,

a Sister of St. Joseph

who had selflessly chosen to serve.

How short and squat and imperious she was

her sternly acid scowl.

Callow students,

too young and arrogant

for her to respect,

with perhaps just a hint of envy.

We are all armed and dangerous.

So cover up and turn away,

avoid crowds

keep your hands from your face.

A malaise is in the air.

Bad blood

like the black plague

corrupting from within.

The poisoned touch

of love's dark shadow

whose embrace you must resist.

In the first month of 2020, an epidemic of a previously unknown Corona virus spread from China to the rest of the world.

At the time of this writing, its contagion (how easily it's spread) and virulence (its lethality) are still being established. The virus' DNA was sequenced rapidly, and so a diagnostic test was available very early on. A vaccine is in development, but it will be at least a year before it could be formulated, tested, and manufactured; and even that seemingly long time interval is unprecedented.

So at this stage, quarantine and personal hygiene are the main means of containing its spread. And so, once again, the strongest recommendation is careful hand washing. In other words, what your mother used to say.

I could have made this poem political. Because it begins with age of contagion, and contagion strongly implies both contamination and impurity. We live in an era of both identity politics and populism, and both have powerful strains of “purity” to them. In the politics of identity, there is the division of people into tribes unified by some incorruptibly defining trait, so that we are all conscripted into membership instead of allowed our messy individuality. And in the “us” vs “them” of populism, there is the purity of the celebrated and pandered to constituency: insiders vs outsiders, nativists vs foreigners, the common man vs the elites. Nazi Germany represents the apotheosis of this idea: the pure Aryan “race”, threatened with contamination by degenerate and subhuman Jews, Gypsies (Roma), homosexuals, and the disabled. 

Instead, it's more personal; and stanzas roughly alternate between my own experience and more general reflections on the theme: which is that this modern plague deprives us of touch, a thing so central to our humanity.